By Temitope Fagunwa, Ph.D.
Historian and Pan-Afrikanist
06/06/2025
Review: RETHINKING CAPITALISM – A Newsletter Series by Felix Rohrbeck
The recently released newsletter series of The New Institute, authored by Felix Rohrbeck, is titled “Rethinking Capitalism” – thenew.institute/archive/rethinking-capitalism/four/rethinking-capitalism-250613-de.html. It centres on a newly established programme called “Africapitalism”, under the leadership of Kenneth Amaeshi. The key idea of the programme is to envision a form of “philanthropic-capitalism” grounded in Ubuntu as an alternative route to growth and development in postcolonial Africa. A concise response to this initiative is essential, because – as this review will reveal, the highly promoted concept of Africapitalism presents no genuine alternative beyond the same capitalist market reform ideals that are responsible for the current Africa’s worst debt crisis in a generation – Between Life and Debt: How Africa is facing the worst debt crisis in a generation | Bond.
This review seeks to achieve two purposes: to underscore the importance of a deep awareness of the trajectories shaping present realities; and second, to support the ongoing scholarly agenda aimed at preventing the obfuscation of African philosophical thought system. While not dismissing the relevance of challenging dominant paradigms in knowledge production, grounding such approaches in empirical realities remains essential. This review is also undertaken as an academic responsibility, owing to a shared interest and scholarly engagement with the subject matter – an engagement that has already produced a peer-reviewed article – Fagunwa: Ubuntu: revisiting an endangered African… – Google Scholar.
In the aforesaid paper, I argued that the concept of “Africapitalism” is unscientific and risks disrobing the remnants of Sotho epistemology – Ubuntu, of its philosophical and scientific essence. It is essential to emphasize the term “remnants” in defiance of the assumption that Africa has remained static in history or failed to evolve beyond its earliest communal social formations. In that paper, I positioned Ubuntu as an endangered value system that finds no space for survival in a society governed by profit motives. However, since the abrupt disruption of Africa’s natural socio-economic progression – particularly that of proto-feudal states, ipso facto the continent’s forcible incorporation into global capitalist processes through colonialism, it is understandable that nostalgic residues of the value systems of the “old world” would persist.
The remnants of the value system mentioned above, however, occupy an insignificant space within the extractive and accumulative mandate of the capitalist economic structure and its socially individualistic value system. Insofar as it lacks any material connection to the imperatives of modern capitalism, it has, in effect, become yet another possessive socio-construct appropriated by the ruling class and its apologists. Just as the cultural essence of Ubuntu was hijacked by the bourgeois South African post-apartheid ruling elites, we are now witnessing a similar attempt by bourgeois economists and self-proclaimed business experts to peddle the illusion that this value system can somehow enable dependent African postcolonial business models to withstand or escape the onslaught of global capitalism.
It is not an unreasonable assumption to make that proponents of Africapitalism, including Kenneth Amaeshi, are convinced of the global failure of capitalism. In fact, the depth of this acknowledgment is evident in the ongoing, though unsettling, attempts to humanize the economic system – hence the solicitation of Ubuntu. Kenneth Amaeshi has explicitly recognized what he calls the “onslaught of capitalism” – Full article: Africapitalism: A Management Idea for Business in Africa?. This admission, at the very least, reveals how unscientific it is to believe that the African continent can be extricated from this global onslaught using the very paradigm that produced it.
It has been argued by the think tanks of Africapitalism that a “humane, compassionate, philanthropic” model of capitalism is possible in postcolonial Africa through an admixture with the Ubuntu value system, which promotes group solidarity and inclusion. This blend is expected to address the structural crises that surround African economies – albeit through a profit-motivated, yet purpose-driven approach to business and entrepreneurship. In effect, the central focus of these ideologues is the creation of an amiable “business–society” relationship, irrespective of the material conditions of the prevailing economic system. But how possible is it to separate the business model of an economic system from its material base? The concrete relations that emerge in the processes of production, distribution, and consumption define the material base of any economic system.
It is unscientific to imagine that business practices and entrepreneurial ideals can somehow be treated as autonomous from the two key material conditions of production; labour relations and property ownership. Like every economic system, capitalism has its own distinct business model – one that is far from accidental in its formation. Within the logic of capitalism, business is fundamentally understood as the extraction and accumulation of surplus value. In other words, the business of capitalism is the business of controlling and managing surplus value extracted from labour, and of accumulating capital through profit-making activities.
In its rise to prominence, the capitalist economic system, by all standards, required the extraction and accumulation of surplus on a large scale – hence the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism. For capitalism, its greatest bulwark is its business model, which thrives on historical dispossession and coercion. The architecture of this model excludes the possibility of sobriety; it is not ideologically neutral, but rather the organizational expression of an economic system that promotes the privatization of public wealth, a wage labour system, and the imperative of capital accumulation. To attempt – however futilely, to divorce capitalist business practices from their material foundations is to obscure the historical logic at the heart of the system’s social relations. Enterprises, factories, companies, and organizations, insofar as they operate within the capitalist paradigm, are not neutral economic units. On the contrary, they are, in concrete terms, institutionalized centres of surplus value extraction and accumulation – sites where human labour is expected to be commodified.
How Ubuntu can ethically redirect the focus of the capitalist business model described above – without transforming its underlying material base – is, without doubt, both a scientific and ideological error. It is such a profound error that it also risks reducing the understanding of exploitative structures to mere moral failure. Perhaps, to be taken intellectually seriously, proponents of Africapitalism should begin to engage in empirical analyses of how the proposed “humane” business–society relationship under capitalism could function in the absence of profit accumulation. Yet, this is an impossible task. Tony Elumelu, a chief architect of Africapitalist ideals – which notably resemble the de-ideologized initiative of Black Capitalism in 1970s and 80s America – has clarified that the proposed alternative does not imply the absence of profit. He merely adds that the pursuit of profit should be intersected with purpose for African entrepreneurs and businesspersons. The unscientific flaw in this uncritical expectation is yet another expression of how the underdeveloped condition of the African continent is continually mythologized by its own elites. Africapitalism emerges, ultimately, as a neocolonial semantic rather than substantive discourse.
Proponents of Africapitalism suggest that businesses should not be driven by profit alone; purpose should also be a driving force. However, they do not reject the need for profit maximization. Given that they do not see the need to overhaul a system driven by profit, how hypocritical is it to attempt to appropriate a philosophical idea – Ubuntu – that is soiled in a philosophical understanding of a world without profit as a driving force? For reference, Ubuntu rejects private ownership of wealth because of its communal social relations antecedents. The intentional ignorance of Ubuntu’s critical stance against profit maximization and private ownership of wealth, shared by proponents of Africapitalism, exposes why this appropriation is itself an expression of academic opportunism. Proponents of this opportunist theory are not interested in a structural transformation of the African continent – one that would ensure the redistribution of wealth, the decommodification of labour, and the challenge to private property.
In recent times, the explosion of the FinTech (Financial Technology) sector has been hailed across the continent by bourgeois economists as the answer to the quest of entrepreneurship. However, within three years of this boom, recent findings – How Loan Apps Ruined My Life – Business – Nigeria, have begun to uncover the nefarious state of these initiatives. These FinTech products, much like Elumelu and his cohorts’ appropriation of “Ubuntu”, while presenting themselves as emblems of empowerment, have consistently waged predatory and exploitative wars targeting the already dispossessed members of working poor households. Erich Hörl, Igor Galligo, Elke Schüßler, and others have aptly described such actors as “Entrepreneurs of Chaos” – Research Initiative: The Disruptive Condition | Leuphana.
It is pertinent to state that these emerging innovations, erroneously wrapped in the language of entrepreneurship or remodeled business strategies, are nothing more than new frontiers for capital accumulation. Many poor households in the Global South are consistently pushed into cycles of debt and repayment by these “financial inclusion without money” innovations. It is crucial to note that, in the end, the greater share of profits made by these companies regularly flows back to sophisticated venture capitalists, tech hubs, and financial centers in the Global North, a consequence of the Global South’s technological dependence.
Unsurprisingly, the above can best be classified as a continuous reproduction of neocolonial socio-economic relations that exploit the labour of African FinTech users through data extraction and a nefarious, incessant debt trap. This condition ultimately serves the interests of global capitalism, beyond the class benefit of the African bourgeois so-called tech experts. As reported in 2024, “the richest 1% in the Global North extracted $30 million per hour from the Global South through the financial system in 2023” Billionaire wealth surges three times faster in 2024 – world now on track for at least five trillionaires within a decade | Oxfam GB. Because these FinTech initiatives are inextricably linked with the surplus-extractive and accumulative objectives of capitalism, it is accurate to consider them emblems of hyper-capitalism through a digitally intensified exploitation model that extends capitalist logic into new spaces such as technologies, mobile phones, informal economies, rural areas, and more. Ultimately, these innovations are not about empowerment but about deepening the financial dependency of citizens of the Global South. They reproduce new forms of exploitation and oppression under the illusion of inclusion.
In concrete terms, the FinTech products on the continent today are mostly about the commodification of desperation and poverty. African users are perceived as financialized subjects rather than as human beings. This creates a situation where hunger and inequality are not alleviated but profitably managed.
It is significant to mention that Africapitalism remains in the realm of abstraction insofar as it exists within the capitalist, neoliberal system. While presenting itself as a self-reliant alternative, the proposal remains rooted in liberalization frameworks, ideals of foreign capital, and global capitalist elites – who are united with the nefarious activities of the IMF and World Bank in the Global South. It is relevant to submit that Africa’s postcolonial crisis is not due to the absence of investment or entrepreneurial strategy, but rather the systemic failure of a capitalist agenda designed to pursue class differentiation, injustice, inequality, and surplus extraction and accumulation. The growth of the market system under capitalism does not equate to economic justice, as proponents of this abstraction would have us believe.
This review has argued that Africapitalism aspires to function within the same exploitative and oppressive frameworks that have kept neocolonial Africa down among the committee of continents of the world. The exoticization of Ubuntu is driven by the agenda of rebranding capitalism with remnants of African moral values that today lack a material base. Africapitalism has no intention of rejecting profit or exploitation but seeks to moralize them. It envisages a futile process of humanizing capitalism. It is an abstract idea that presents the illusion of ethical progression in the face of capital accumulation and labour exploitation. Poverty, inequality, ecological collapse, and other contemporary crises are not caused by failures of values but are symptoms of global capitalist contradictions.